Misperception:

The ethnic minority groups are having difficulty in integrating into local society due to the insufficient access of local language. Yet, they are capable of communicating with others by mixing multilingual languages. With Indonesian as their mother tongue, other languages such as their dialects, English and Cantonese are supplementary for other occasions.

 

Reasons contributing to their Multilingualism:

The psychosocial situation( Krumm & Plutzar,2008) is the first contributing factor.  The predisposed education from their homeland and through parents local education provides them with an opportunity to learn the official language whereas parents may use a particular dialect(e.g. Javanese) at home as in the case of Sumi and Heny. The idea of peripheral language versus metropolitan language is applied to their daily lives very oftenly (details referring to “Language and Identity” section, paragraph four). With the government acknowledgement, Indonesian is their metropolitan language as a more dominant, and the official language. The dialect and other language such as English and Cantonese are considered as their peripheral language. In Indonesia, they are very likely in experiencing egalitarian bilingualism  (Nettle, 2000), none of the languages are considered as useless. This is probably why the Indonesians enjoy from a linguistic diversity. Under this circumstance, the Indonesians are provided with a wider market to get a job. Even when they try to work overseas as a domestic helper, the local community(here: Indonesia) has language school which provides sufficient language program(here: Cantonese, English, Mandarin and etc.). Through this way, most of them change from bilingual to trilingual or even multilingual in the matter of their preference.

 

Effects of “global” English on Indonesia:

English as being criticized as the imperial language doesn’t have that strong influence on Indonesia when comparing to other Asian countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore. Their very limited resources on English lessons indicate the status of English as another choice of language, an access to an important foreign language. Though higher English proficiency guarantee them a more promising, more international career prospect. Yet, according to our interviewees, they believe they can still make a good living without mastering English.

 

Dominance of Indonesian in Indonesia:

Apart from the weaker effect of “global English” as mentioned above, the similarity between Indonesian and Malay could also be a factor of the intactness of Indonesian. Basically, they are just different dialects of Bahasa Indonesian, which are as similar as the distinction between American and British English (Thompson, 2014). Since Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesian has a wide base of speakers of nearly 160 million (“Top 10 Most Spoken Languages In The World” ,2008). Also, there are numbers of shop organized by the Indonesian for them to have a taste of their food. Their identity as an Indonesian is not lost even as an immigrant in Hong Kong for several years.. This keep Indonesian safe from the “invasion” of the global English. From this view, the numbers of speakers is extremely important in maintaining a language’s popularity.

 

Advocacy of mother tongue:

Also stated by Krumm and Plutzar (2008), linguistic right is part of human rights-- “in fact, the right of using mother tongue is considered as fundamental human right.” Despite the popularity of English across the globe, mother tongue should not be abandoned as a progress of globalization. From our interview, the language proficiency of the interviewees are indeed quite poor, some of them can handle Cantonese better than English. Nevertheless, they feel satisfied of their lives and they are able to make friends, seek jobs without one language(here: Cantonese or English) over their native language(Indonesian).